Player Features and Ideas Discussion

ok dont have my coffee yet so bear with me..........

My perspective is coming from Highsec, i no longer live in null, have not in a few years now sicne i raged quit on the account that did over an argument with an alliance leader that failcascaded while i was gone.

Anyway, my point is this...lets say that I have an alt....its at war, i dont like the current odds....i can keep tabs on the target(s), stay in system, blah blah blah....while basically being AFK playing on another character till the odds or favorable oppurtunity changes.

imo...cloaking even in that regards is wrong....there should be a way to counter it.

edit: an afterthought, but any counter needs to be change to mechanics that applies to the entire system of cloaking. (sigh hope you understand that, going to go make my coffee and breakfast)

It's on the first page.

This threads existence does not mean ccp nor isd's think there is anything that needs fixing. It is simply a thread to put all the whining in one place.

Ccp fozzie hinted that something might be done, but that it had something to do with afk cloaking not being an issue in wh space. This was well over a year ago though.


@max deveron
You're coming from the exact same position that i did when i first came to these threads. I dislike the immunity that cloaks provide. But i got into a lengthy discussion with our old friend nikk narrel about local. The way it works completely defeats the point of cloaking. There is no way, outside of wh's, to sneak up on people because you are painfully obvious in local. In many cases you are painfully obvious several systems out and all targets disappear before you even load system. The only way to get people to doubt your presence and leave the safety of their pos/citadel is to appear to be afk. You have to screw up on multiple levels to be caught by a regular roam, and as a result very few ratters are caught by non-cloakers.

There is counter play to afk cloaking at the moment. True you will never get the initiative, but ratting in groups and having a cyno ready makes ambushing you immensely more dangerous. The reason this thread has gone on so long? Because null bears feel entitled to rat without support (case in point from our latest arrivals). Other players disrupting their game play should be forbidden. And null bears are unable to think their ideas through.

And as for their ideas:
- If you can decloak a cloaked ship then all the null bears dock up and a combat fleet arrives forcing the decloaked cloaker out. There is no opportunity to disrupt resource gathering.

- If you know that someone is afk because of a flag in local then you also know when they are not afk by the lack of flag. Everyone knows when to dock up and when not to dock up. There is no opportunity to disrupt resource gathering.

- If cloaking takes fuel then the ratters know its only a matter of time before a cloaker has to leave. They simply sit in safety and wait it out. Then when the cloaker is gone, rat in absolute safety. This is the worst of both worlds. The cloaker is still untouchable until he leaves and the ratter is still ratting with no risk.

A compromise needs to be made. Local is too powerful. Cloaks are too powerful. A way for cloaked ships to be found would be good, but only if it requires some kind of effort and only if it isn't stupidly obvious the second an enemy enters system, especially an enemy using a cloak. There should be significant risk when you're ratting in null.

others ideas
-I am not sure about an ability that can pin point a cloaked ship, not without convulted mechanics to the probing side fo things and maybe exorbitant expensive new types of probes....like really expensive and more than difficult to acquire. im on the fence of the topic but leaning towards a -1.

-hmmm, Fuel....again as Teckos said you could truck that in, doesnt help....maybe a really high cap drain that can not be mitigated effectively, then you just run around till your cap recharges? idk.

-the flag thing...im not going to search for that in this threadnaught to even get the basics of it but it sounds bad the way you explained it.


Ok so if both are too powerful........
And you say a compromise.
I for one dont like the idea of making local like wormhole space.....because it would make no sense to do so just for null, and if just because of newbros it would be detrimental to highsec since Constellation and Regional are already like that, doesnt make any sense to make them feel isolated and in a Solo player game when they are not. And you could not make that change sensibly without making the change a blanket for all of K-Space.

Now i did hear something earlier........
Would a combination of my module idea.....(with or without the new skills)
plus effectively allowing Cloakers and Recon ships (thinking like Rook here, Falcon is a cloaker) to dissappear from local when their systems were activated............
ok lost my train of thought, RL.
anyway i think you get the gist of what i am saying, would it be a closer step towards such a compromise?

I want to reiterate/emphasize a number of points Daichi made above.

If you have been caught by an active cloaker or a roaming gang you made several mistakes. Several. Mistakes. Those mistakes are probably:

1. Not on voice comms.
2. Not in a standing fleet.
3. Not watching intel.
4. Not watching local.

We killed 2 rorquals a gila and a dreadnought (the thanny pilot thought better of it and was just outside the dictor bubbles so he e-cyno'd out) a few nights ago. There were something like 80 of us. We were a huge freaking gang, mostly in caracals burning Hell bent for leather to the desto system. 80 or so people burning through a number of hostile systems....there were clearly a number of serious screw ups there that let us get those kills.

As for ratting in a group we had that discussion awhile ago. It was pointed out that the damage output from 5-6 ishtars is pretty impressive. So much so that there is a good chance you'll take at least one BLOPs with you, maybe more. So even if they wipe out your entire fleet of ishtars the isk war will likely be 50-50 based on just the hull value of the BLOPs. Factor in some nice blingy modules and you guys might "win". If the drop even happens.

Will you make as much ISK relative to ratting solo? No. But WITF? Some ISK > Zero ISK. Not only that, but if the BLOPs guys decide not to drop on you eventually they'll move that covert cyno ship. It is like running from a bear. I don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the next slowest guy. If they move on looking for better hunting grounds...you win. Congratulations.

And in addition to Daichi's points about unrestrained resource/ISK gathering....many of these changes nerf ATK cloaking. Nerfing people who are NOT the problem to "balance" those who are is by definition unbalanced and just lazy stupid game development.

Am I open to addressing the AFK cloaking issue? Yes, I have been for longer than some of these people have been playing the game. I have made my views on this known (repeatedly) way back in my old mega-thread on ****** anti-cloaking collection thread. My preferred approach is local becomes delayed. The observatory array offers some fitting options for finding cloaked players, but that these things are no vulnerable to attack. If you bugger off and hide in your outpost, citadel, POS, whatever, it will be destroyed and you'll not be blind. Even better allow a hacking option so that it can be subverted, a neutral or hostile appears blue.

Local is the problem, it is very powerful. So much so that people are very safe using it along with intel channels to mitigate their risk to a significant degree. Now I'm fine with this...so long as we have AFK cloaking so that resource/ISK acquisition can be adversely effected. But that is the thing isn't it...you want to remove AFK and keep your powerful intel tool. In short you want to have your cake and eat it too.

So local, along with boatloads of player effort and safe flying practices, allows for the mitigation of risk, which is OK so long as you are spoonfed with a mechanic to completely remove any benefit from the player effort and safe flying. Gotcha.

Boatloads? Watching local is that hard for you? Putting the intel channel next too is hard? Jesus.

Oh and lets not forgot that you are gaining resources, the person sitting at a safe and cloaked is not. That right there makes it much more reasonable.

Typical Dracvlad, everyone else is talking about cloaks and he is talking about a straight up roam.

Please link the interceptor fit you apparently have that allows a player to enter a system, warp to, and tackle someone else within the time it takes to notice a local flash and warp a pre aligned ship back to base. The statistics clearly demonstrate how much risk mitigation there is, Hi and Lo sec have far more destruction than null, and a large part of the reason is the difference in usefulness of local. I wish the report showed J-Space as well, because amazingly people still manage to harvest resources without local crutch, they just do it with far more risk.

Is it sarcasm to point out that you don't know a single player that has the ability to prevent someone from warping to safety the instant they see a hostile in local? The only people that get caught are the ones not paying attention. logical fallacies like the use of anecdotes are stupid, and they do not work on intelligent people.

For someone who claims to know the game so well you seem to not understand hole control. Establishing Hole Control is itself a risky activity, and it must be constantly maintained because it resets daily and sometimes randomly.

As for Cynos, again tell to me your method of using Cynos which prevents people from docking to safety the instant they see hostiles in local.

If you are wondering why CCP is whacking carriers with the nerf bat, look no further than the safety of Null, because Null-bears don't want to accept the risk associated with the high rewards of Null, CCP has to reduce the profits. CCP Quant was mostly correct in his analysis, the problem is that people want all the perks without the risk. Unfortunately they are nerfing the perks when they should be increasing the risk.

Null sec needs a New Order.